President Barack Obama said during his final State of the Union that he would reform how oil and gas development is managed on public lands. Great, say environmental groups, who add that in order to really “protect the planet and his own climate legacy,” he must keep those fossil fuels in the ground.
Reacting to the president’s announcement to push for changes to oil and coal resource management, Abigail Dillen, Earthjustice Vice President of Litigation for Climate and Energy, said, “This is essential,” while Greenpeace USA Executive Director Annie Leonard called it “encouraging.”
“For far too long,” Leonard’s statement continued, “the Interior Department has given away our publicly owned fossil fuels to mining and drilling companies without regard for the damage they cause to communities and our climate.”
As Ben Adler explained at Grist on Monday:
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said ahead of the address that Obama should seize his “final opportunity to curb one of the gravest dangers to the world’s climate: fossil fuel companies’ grotesque exploitation of America’s beautiful public lands. Every new fossil fuel lease pushes our planet closer to a dangerous climate tipping point because it locks us into more decades of dangerous carbon pollution.”
Leases on public land and offshore areas “now generate nearly a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions,” Suckling said. “Fracking, mining and drilling are destroying America’s natural heritage to create planet-warming pollution.”
It’s a key moment, Jamie Henn, director of communications and strategy for 350.org, writes, to see if Obama will “continue to act in the way he did on Keystone XL, standing up to Big Oil and turning down projects that endanger the climate and our communities or […] continue to promote fossil fuel development, leaving a legacy full of contradictions and half-measures. Here’s why:
Taking this important climate action to truly embark on an energy transition “is change the President can lead,” Earthjustice’s Dillen says.
And here’s an important reminder: “These lands are owned by the American people,” Suckling stated, adding that “the administration has a responsibility to manage them for the public trust. In the president’s last year in office, he must find the courage to take this powerful action to protect the planet and his own climate legacy.”
The Center for Biological Diversity and 350.org were among hundreds of organizations who signed a letter for Obama in September 2015 urging him, for economic reasons as well as for the climate, to stop new leases for fossil fuel extraction on areas that are “cherished resources for us all [and that] embody deep and diverse cultural values and provide clean air and water, recreation and solitude, and refuge for endangered wildlife.”
The letter states that the Obama “administration alone has leased nearly 15 million acres of public land and 21 million acres of ocean for fossil fuel industrialization. In total more than 67 million acres—an area 55 times larger than Grand Canyon National Park—is already leased to the fossil fuel industry.”
Stopping such leases “would safeguard our air and water from dirty energy pollution; ensure the health of communities that have lived in energy sacrifice zones for generations; and keep our last, best wildlife habitat from being lost to fossil fuel industrialization,” they wrote.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.